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"Coetzee" redirects here. For other uses, see Coetzee (disambiguation).

John Maxwell Coetzee (pronounced ) (OMG) born in Cape Town on 9 February 1940 to English and German parents is a South African / Australian author and 2003 Nobel Prize laureate, who emigrated from South Africa in 2002. He was granted Australian citizenship on 6 March 2006.

Biography & career

Coetzee was born in Cape Town, and his formative years were spent between that city and the Western Cape town of Worcester, as recounted in his fictionalised memoir, Boyhood (1992). He was schooled at St. Joseph's College, a Catholic school in Rondebosch, Cape Town, and later studied at the University of Cape Town, where he took degrees in mathematics and English.

In the early 1960s he relocated to London, England, where he worked for a time at IBM as a computer programmer; his experiences there were later recounted in Youth (2002), his second volume of fictionalised memoirs. Coetzee was later awarded a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States, where he applied computerised stylistic analysis to the works of Samuel Beckett. After leaving Texas he taught English and literature at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) in New York until 1971.

In 1971 he sought permanent residence in the United States, but it was denied due to his involvement in protests against the US military intervention in Vietnam. He then returned to South Africa to a professorship in English Literature at the University of Cape Town. Upon retirement in 2002, he relocated to Adelaide, Australia, where he was made an honorary research fellow at the English department of the University of Adelaide, where his partner, Dorothy Driver, is a fellow academic *. He served as professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago until 2003. In addition to his novels, he has published critical works and translations from Dutch and Afrikaans.

He is known as a reclusive and humourless man, who eschews publicity to such an extent that he did not collect either of his two Booker prizes in person.He married in 1963 and divorced in 1980. He had a daughter and a son from the marriage, but his son was killed at the age of 23 in an accident: an event Coetzee confronts in his 1994 novel The Master of Petersburg.

On 6 March 2006, he took Australian citizenship in a ceremony presided over by the Australian Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone. Following the ceremony, Coetzee stated, in speaking of his affection for Australia; "I was attracted by the free and generous spirit of the people, by the beauty of the land itself and - when I first saw Adelaide - by the grace of the city that I now have the honour of calling my home."

Achievements & awards

Coetzee has gained many awards throughout his career. The novel Waiting for the Barbarians was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1980, and he is three times winner of the CNA prize. Age of Iron was awarded the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, and The Master of Petersburg was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1995. he has also won the French Fémina Prize, the Faber memorial Award, the Commonwealth Literary Award, and in 1987 won the Jerusalem Prize for literature on the freedom of the individual in society.

He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize twice: first for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and again for Disgrace in 1999.

On 2 October 2003, it was announced that he was to be the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the fourth African born writer to be so honoured, and the second (as he then was) South African (after Nadine Gordimer). When awarded the prize, he was praised for "in innumerable guises portraying the involvement of the outsider." The press release for the award cited his "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue, and analytical brilliance," while focusing on the moral nature of his work. The prize ceremony was held in Stockholm on 10 December 2003.

Coetzee was awarded the Order of Mapungubwe by the South African government on 27 September 2005, for his "exceptional contribution in the field of literature and for putting South Africa on the world stage".*

Bibliography

Fiction

Autobiographical Works

Non-Fiction

See also

External links

1940 births | Living people | Australian writers | Booker Prize winners | IBM employees | Nobel Prize in Literature winners | South African poets | South African writers | University at Buffalo faculty | University of Chicago faculty | University of Texas at Austin alumni | People from Cape Town | Natives of Western Cape Province | Afrikaners | South African Australians | Anglo-South Africans | South African expatriates in the United States | University of Cape Town academics

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